St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)
End Semester Examination – SEPT / Oct. 2014
B.COM (Travel and Tourism) – I semester
GENERAL ENGLISH
Duration: 3 hours Max Marks: 100
Section -A
- Write short notes on the following in about 100 words. (4×5 =20)
- Cordoba House Project.
- Fei Xiaotong, the first Chinese intellectual.
- The tombs of Cain and Abel – The Great Railway Bazaar.
- Ending of the story Shooting an Elephant.
- Answer the following questions in about 250 words. (4×10 =40)
- Describe the native people’s behaviour towards Orwell in the story Shooting an Elephant. Why did Orwell kill the elephant against his will? Do you think he took the right decision?
- Why did Paul Theroux board on a slow passenger train to reach his destination? Describe any particular observation made by him during his travel that you find interesting and why?
- 7. Give an account of the description of India made in Western Literature. Compare and contrast it with the nineteenth century description of India in the essay India in Mind.
- What is the debate surrounding the proposed Islamic centre? Why has it become a testing zone of ‘religious freedom’ and ‘limits of tolerance’ in the United States?
Section – B
III. Read the following passage and answer the following questions in about three paragraphs.
Is there anyone in any part of India who does not admire China? asked Yi Jing in the seventeenth century, on returning from India to China. Yi Jing may have fallen a little for exaggerated rhetoric, but there was certainly much intellectual interest about China in India at that time, as there was about India in China. Yi Jing had just spent ten years at the institute of higher learning, Nalanda, which attracted many scholars from outside India, in addition to domestic students.
Yi Jing, who studied medicine in Nalanda in addition to Buddhist philosophy and practice, was one of the many Chinese scholars who visited India in the first millennium to study Bhuddism and other subjects ( and also to collect Sanskrit documents) , and many of them spent a decade or more in India . In the other direction, hundreds of Indian scholars went to China and worked there between the first century and the eleventh. They were engaged in variety of work, which included translating Sanskrit documents into Chinese (mostly Buddhist writing), but also other activities, such as the pursuit of mathematics and science. Several Indian mathematicians and astronomers held high positions in China’s scientific establishment, and an Indian scientist called Gautama Siddhartha, became the president of the official Board of Astronomy in China in the eighth century.
Intellectual links between China and India, stretching over much of the first millennium and beyond, were important in the history of the two countries. And yet they are hardly remembered today. What little notice they do get tends to come from those interested in religious history, particularly Buddhism. But religion is only one part of a much bigger story of Sino – Indian connections over the first millennium, and there is need for a broader understanding of the reach of these relations. This is important for a fuller appreciation not only of the history of a third of the world’s population, but also for the continuing relevance of these connections, linked as they are with contemporary political and social concerns.
It is certainly correct to see religion as a major for the historical closeness of China and India, and to appreciate the central role of Buddhism in initiating the movement of people and ideas between the two countries. However, even though Buddhism served as a critically important influence, the intellectual interactions between the two countries initiated by Buddhism were not confined to religion only. The non –religious (or what in current terminology, may be called secular) consequences of these relations stretched well into science, mathematics, literature, linguistics, architecture, medicine and music.
It is not, however, easy to rescue the variety and reach of early Sino Indian intellectual relations from their interpretational confinement in the religious basket. Indeed, religious reductionism has been re enforced in recent years by the contemporary obsessions with classifying the world populations into distinct ‘civilizations’ like Western civilization, Islamic civilization, Hindu Civilization and Buddhist civilization.
Answer the following questions in about three paragraphs.
- Comment on the India China relationship as mentioned in the passage. (Write it in your own words). Compare and contrast it with the present description of China as written by Ramachandra Guha in the text A Nehruvian in China. (15 Marks)
- What are the two important factors that strengthened the Indo China bond in the past centuries? Reflect on the word ‘multiculturalism’ and describe the words ‘pluralism’ and ‘diversity’ and ‘religious reductionism’ in the context India and China. Use the above passage and your reading of the essay A Nehruvian in China to elaborate your answer. (15 Marks)
Section – C
- Write a narrative in about 100 to 150 words of your unplanned trip to some destination of your choice. (10 Marks)
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